Bracing also to hear that the aforesigned cognoscenti share my appreciation of the poet Vassilis, and that the ever discerning and attentive Hazen has taken the time to search out and read more (I've done so likewise, and been multiply rewarded).

The idea that chimeras arrive from elsewhere and take us with them came to seem to me particularly and vividly applicable to life and death as lived and sensed and guessed at (I don't know what the dead do or don't know, but they sure leave a lot of their spirit behind) during my recent high speed night ride (Those in a hurry arrive first at the grave) to the busy Triage Unit of the East Bay Trauma Center... and ever since.

Ghosts, chimeras, alien life forms, which if any of them will take the trouble to come and snatch us away from our precious little selves before it's too late and we have, with our little games, destroyed the Blue Marble?

It must be that Blake's hair-on-fire vision and my own fiery near-scalping collided with Vassilis's poem inside the damaged cranial superconductor to make me think of, of all people, Peretz Bernstein.

Perhaps better known to some as Perry Farrell.

It's the hair on fire that put me in mind of this.

I don't know what the dead do or don't know, but they sure leave a lot of their spirit behind.

There's a Perry Farrell song called Pets that touches on this theme of how other, superior life forms may ultimately dispose of us. If we're lucky.

Children are innocentA teenager's fucked up in the headAdults are even more fucked upAnd elderlies are like childrenWill there be another raceTo come along and take over for us?Maybe Martians could doBetter than we've doneWe'll make great pets!My friend says we're like the dinosaursOnly we are doing ourselves inMuch faster than theyEver didWe'll make great pets!

(And though I hate to pry, and never ask such questions, a small bit of the flickering-filament genie can't help wondering whether the Chris who is our good friend here is the same briliant Chris who posted the poem below, and for his trouble was curiously called "Jim" by a blog chimera named "Judy" -- or could it have been "Jane"??)

The Letters of the Dead

We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods,but gods, nonetheless, since we know the dates that follow.We know which debts will never be repaid.Which widows will remarry with the corpse still warm.Poor dead, blindfolded dead,gullible, fallible, pathetically prudent.We see the faces people make behind their backs.We catch the sound of wills being ripped to shreds.The dead sit before us comically, as if on buttered bread,or frantically pursue the hats blown from their heads.Their bad taste, Napoleon, steam, electricity,their fatal remedies for curable diseases,their foolish apocalypse according to St. John,their counterfeit heaven on earth according to Jean-Jacques…We watch the pawns on their chessboards in silence,even though we see them three squares later.Everything the dead predicted has turned out completely different.Or a little bit different – which is to say, completely different.The most fervent of them gaze confidingly into our eyes:their calculations tell them that they’ll find perfection there.

And now the flickering-filament genie, tiring of this braindamaged senior tomfoolery, reminds that there had been an intention to provide the proper link to that Szymborska poem-posting by Chris at Passion Task Commonplace Book.